Who has difficulty writing down or remembering a few spells? A combat is about 4 rounds. It's also just as hard to remember or write that a creature has cast a fireball spell as it is to remember that it used the fireblast ability. The excess spells don't need to be remembered or tracked, so that's not a point of difficulty at all.
I mean, I don't find integrating a low degree polynomial over a closed interval to be difficult. If the coefficients are modest, I can do it in my head.
I appreciate that you feel that way, but I don't think your preferences are universal. Nor do I think it is necessarily a positive development to continuously reduce complexity for "ease of use." I think it continues the "MCUification" of the game. Granted, my preferences aren't any more "important" than yours, so the real trends will be driven by some combination of market research, fan feedback, and designer preference.
"I want stuff to happen" is exactly it. I don't want my turn to be bogged down with trying to strategically determine which spell is the best to use with what spell slot. I want to be able to say "hmmm, Vecna does THIS now!" instead
I have trouble understanding how it's easy to track the use 5 abilities all usable once per day, but tracking the use of 5 spells all usable once per day is horribly hard to do. Would it help if they called it ability casting instead of spellcasting?
His preferences don't have to be universal...just in the majority.
I just took the Mouthless One's stat block (as linked above), pasted it into Word, and without deleting any content got it down to 1 highly legible page. I can even grow the font a couple of points and it only becomes a page and a half.
I don't actually intend "MCUification" to be pejorative (and to be clear I certainly don't want to imply DCEUification would be positive). I merely use the term as shorthand for "make it broadly appealing, even if that means making it a little shallow and tossing out minutia where necessary."
